The Last Express
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| The Last Express {{#if:{{{image|}}}|<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">{{{image|}}} | |
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| Developer(s) | Smoking Car Productions {{#if:{{{publisher|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Publisher(s)<td>{{{publisher|}}} |
| Release date(s) | 1997 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure game |
| Mode(s) | Single player {{#if:{{{ratings|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Rating(s)<td>{{{ratings|}}} |
| Platform(s) | Windows, Mac OS, DOS {{#if:{{{media|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Media<td>{{{media|}}} |
The Last Express, a video game by Jordan Mechner and Smoking Car Productions, is a real-time adventure game and one of the most expensive and innovative ever made. The project took nearly four years to complete and included a month-long bluescreen filmshoot and a round-the-clock staff of up to 50 animators, artists, asset wranglers, and programmers, and according to one of the team members was tightly run. The Last Express won many awards but was not a commercial success.
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Story
Set on the Orient Express in 1914, the player takes the role of Robert Cath, an American on the train's final journey from Paris to Constantinople before World War I. As the train leaves Paris, Robert Cath boards via motorcycle and looks for his friend, Tyler Whitney, who is already on board (seen during the introduction). Upon arriving at Tyler's compartment, he finds his friend a bloody corpse on the floor, and a portion of Tyler's luggage missing. Already wanted by the French police on suspicion of murder, Cath must assume his friend's identity, discover who killed his friend, recover what was stolen, and discover how it relates to everything else going on just before the outbreak of the First World War.
The game has 30 characters representing a cross-section of European forces at the time, including Serbian terrorists, a German arms dealer, Russian aristocrats, an Austrian spy posing as a concert violinist, a British secret agent, and a mysterious art collector. As the train races east, the player must stay alive while interacting with these characters: eavesdropping on conversations, sneaking into compartments, defusing a bomb, getting attacked, and so on. The story is non-linear, with the player's actions (and failures to act) determining the course of the story; as a result, the game's script is an extraordinary 800 pages long.
Technology
The Last Express is a unique game in that it takes place in almost complete real-time (e.g. thirty minutes of real-life time translates into thirty minutes of game time). The game begins at 7:14 PM on July 24th, 1914, and ends at 6:30 PM on July 27th (if the player has made it all the way to the proper ending). The only time that the game does not take place in real-time is when Cath sleeps, or is knocked unconscious, as well as in a few cutscenes. This technique is put to great use in the game in the concert portion, in which two of the non-player characters perform a piano/violin duet that lasts aproximately twenty minutes of real-time, during which the player is free to sit down and and enjoy the music, or move as he pleases. The game's some thirty characters are all semi-intelligent and each have their own agendas, moving around on their own, or changing their plans due to player intervention. In this way, the game has great replay value, as the branching paths this creates makes no two plays of the game alike. In addition, the game has multiple endings, most (about thirty) being "fatal", meaning that the player is either killed or arrested. There are four "non-fatal" endings, of which only one is considered to be the proper ending.
Publishing
The 3 CD game was published on a combined Mac and PC disc in April 1997. Following a bidding war between all the major game publishers, Brøderbund, Softbank, and GameBank split the worldwide distribution rights for various platforms. There are six languages spoken in the game (which are subtitled for languages that Cath understands), and dubbed versions of The Last Express were soon released in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.
Ratings
The Last Express received rave reviews both in print and online. Newsweek called it "exquisite" and "thrilling" and MSNBC said "the mystery and characters are very fascinating" and "this game is definitely for everyone." Games magazine declared it the Best New Adventure and Role Playing Game, and it received Editor's Choice awards from PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, Next Generation, and dozens of game websites, including a gold medal from GamesDomain.
However, the game only remained in stores for a few months. Brøderbund's marketing department quit just weeks before the game was released, resulting in virtually no advertising for it. Softbank pulled out of the game market, dissolving its subsidiary GameBank and canceling several dozen titles in development, including the nearly finished PlayStation port of The Last Express. As a final ironic blow, Brøderbund was acquired by The Learning Company, which was only interested in their educational and home productivity software. The Last Express was out of print long before its first Christmas season and nearly a million units shy of breaking even.
Looking back
Given the high development costs, and the odds against a first-person adventure selling one million units, it is unlikely that The Last Express would have made a profit, even had it remained in print. However, by dropping their support of an already completed game, Brøderbund and Softbank most likely increased their losses.
In 2000, the game publisher Interplay bought the lapsed rights and began quietly selling the game. A short time later, they ceased this practice, so the game is once again out of print. The game can, however, still be found on Ebay.